Shannon K. Orr

The Private Sector on Public Land: Policy Implications of a SWOT Analysis of Banff National Park

Abstract Banff National Park located in the Canadian Rocky Mountains is in many ways a paradox: protected wilderness with a thriving private sector. While some argue that these are incompatible, others welcome the commercial presence within the park as a way to complement nature-based tourism and provide services for local residents in the town of Banff. The objective of this research is to use a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threat (SWOT) analysis to determine how to support the business sector in Banff National Park within a framework of national park regulations and the imperative need for sustainability.

Exploring Stakeholder Values and Interests in Evaluation

One of the challenges facing program evaluation education is how to bridge the need to train students in theoretical and methodological foundations, and also prepare them for the unpredictability and complex environment outside the classroom. This issue is particularly challenging in terms of understanding stakeholder values and interests. The Bella City Zoo role-play scenario is an effort to integrate traditional lecture material with role-playing to give students the opportunity to learn about stakeholder participation and to put that material into immediate practice.

Protecting paradise: a cross-national analysis of biome- protection policies

Abstract Land protection policies such as creating and preserving national parks have been promoted to counter global threats to the environment and to conserve biodiversity. We know little, however, about the country characteristics that might be good predictors of whether states will choose to protect land or not. What factors within a state need to be the focus of global attention or need to be encouraged to promote land-protection policies? Using the global standard of 10% ecoregion protection, we test four categories of predictors–biodiversity, environmental threats, politics (such as treaty participation and NGO activity), and economics (such as GDP and trade measures)–as well as a multidimensional model in a multivariate analysis of 129 countries. Our findings suggest that the multidimensional model best predicts when it is likely that a country will protect land. While a number of key variables such as economic are not supported, the environmental threats model presents us with the strongest individual reason for land protection.

Reimagining Global Climate Change: Alternatives to the UN Treaty Process

As highlighted by the so-called “Brokenhagen” (2009) and “Can’tcun” (2010) meetings, frustrations about the United Nations climate change negotiation process abound. Global climate change represents one of the biggest challenges facing the international community today. Through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), parties are charged with cooperating to develop a global mandate, and with launching national strategies to address both emissions reductions and adaptation to climate change. However, after little success at the most recent UN treaty negotiations, there has been a growing discontent about the international treaty process as the means to solving the climate change problem. Three recent volumes address this dissatisfaction, contributing to our understanding of the challenges and shortcomings of treaty negotiations, yet also proposing three very different alternatives to solve the impasse. In Climate Governance at the Crossroads Matthew Hoffmann argues that, after two decades of multilateral negotiations and untold monies spent, we have very little to show. He has written this book out of a sense of frustration with the multilateral treaty process and the general lack of progress in moving forward, and the need to re-envision climate change governance from a micro-perspective. As an alternative to traditional top-down governance approaches such as the prevailing UN treaty system, Hoffmann examines what he calls “experimental” systems of governance. This book looks at 58 climate governance “experiments” such as carbon rationing action groups, social network platforms, cor-